How do I reduce the gaps between plots using ggarrange in R?

Question

I am trying to create a waffle plot with a total of 9 plots in one. However, no matter what I try, I am not able to reduce the spacing between the 3 columns in the plot. This is the plot I have now. Wafle plot football

The code I used so far goes like this :-

fig1 <- waffle(Intvec, rows=10, size=2.0, 
           colors=c("#cb181d", "#238b45", "#0570b0", 
                    "#fec44f", "#ec7014", "#6a51a3"),
           title = "Inter")
fig1$layers[[1]]$aes_params$colour <- '#252525'
fin1 <- fig1 + theme(plot.background = element_rect(fill = "#252525", colour = "#252525")) +
theme(legend.position = "none") +
labs(y = "Serie A", main = "Inter") +
 theme(axis.title.y = element_text(color="#bdbdbd", size=18, face="bold"),
 plot.title = element_text(colour = "#ffffff", size = 20, face = "bold"))
fin1

and doing the same for 8 other plots before using ggarrange

fig <- ggarrange(fin1, fin2, fin3, fin4, fin5,
                 fin6, fin7, fin8, fin9,
                 nrow = 3, ncol = 3)

Could anyone please help me in sorting out this issue?

Answer 1

A year and a half late... but I encountered the same issue. What worked for me is setting the ggplot margin: theme(plot.margin = unit(c(0,0.2,0,1), 'lines'))

Keep in mind that the order for the plot margins in ggplot2 is different than in base R plots:

unit(c(top, right, bottom, left), units).

Answer 2

also very late to the party... this may be caused by your choice of device / device size:

ggsave(filename = my_filename,
       plot = last_plot(),
       width = 270, # 14.1 x 5.05 in 358 x 256 mm 
       height = 195,# 
       units = "mm",
       dpi = 200,
       device = "bmp"
)

width and height ultimately determine how much space your figure(s) have, so how much the margins will be compressed to fit it in.